From futurist Stephan A. Schwartz - Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

[giovonni]

Note ~ for the last few days it has been raining buckets here in the greater Seattle area. Just this afternoon, as i was driving past a local farming pasture, i glanced over and observed some cows who were grazing seeming obvious to the pouring rain ~ i couldn't help wondering about the accuracy of the following news report?



Radiation Traces Found in U.S. Milk
By Stephen Power

March 30, 2011

The U.S. government said Wednesday that traces of radiation have been found in milk in Washington state, but said the amounts are far too low to trigger any public-health concern.

The Environmental Protection Agency said a March 25 sample of milk produced in the Spokane, Wash., area contained a 0.8 pico curies per literlevel of iodine-131, which it said was less than one five-thousandth of the safety safety guideline set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The EPA said it increased monitoring after radiation leaked from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It expects more such findings in coming days, but in amounts "far below levels of public-health concern, including for infants and children."

Iodine-131 has a half-life of about eight days, meaning levels should fade quickly. "These findings are a minuscule amount compared to what people experience every day," the agency said.

For example, a person would be exposed to low levels of radiation on a round trip cross country flight, watching television, and even from construction materials," Patricia Hansen, an FDA senior scientist, said in a written statement distributed by the EPA late Wednesday.

The FDA last week said it will block imports of Japanese milk products and certain other foods produced in the area around the Fukushima nuclear facility because of concerns about radiation contamination.

An EPA spokesman said that while the agency isn't certain that the iodine-131 found in the sampled milk came from Fukushima, its discovery is "consistent with" what the agency knows has been released so far from the damaged nuclear reactors there.

"We know we don't normally see iodine-131 in milk. We know there's been an incident where it's been released," the spokesman said. "And now we're seeing it."

Dairy industry officials stressed that products remained safe.

"Consumer safety is the highest priority for dairy farmers and dairy foods companies, and today's report by EPA and FDA confirms that our nation's dairy products continue to be safe to eat and drink," said Rob Vandenheuvel, general manager of the Ontario, Calif.-based Milk Producers Council, which represents dairies in Southern and Central California. "We recognize the concerns of our consumers, and the U.S. dairy industry will continue to work closely with federal and state government agencies to ensure that we maintain a safe milk supply."

Source;
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj

comments: giovonni

[giovonni]

this is interesting...

31 March 2011 Last updated at 06:00 ET

Gravity satellite yields 'Potato Earth' view
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, Munich



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12911806

[giovonni]

The issue of the bees does not merit the attention of mainstream media; they are too focused on Donald Trump's verbal farts for bees to command their attention.

But of the 100 crops humanity lives on 70 exist only because bees pollinate them. Both honey and bumble bees are in precipitous decline; if this continues the health or you and your family are going to be catastrophically affected.

However, there are powerful corporate special interests working against humanity's self-interest, and the sheeple are passive, so I don't anticipate a happy outcome.

***********

Government asked to investigate new pesticide link to bee decline

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

Wednesday, 30 March 2011

The Government is being asked to investigate a possible link between a new generation of pesticides and the decline of honey bees. It is suspected that the chemicals may be impairing the insects' ability to defend themselves against harmful parasites through grooming.

The Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, will have to answer a question in the Commons from the former Home Office minister David Hanson about whether the Government will investigate if the effect of neonicotinoids on the grooming behaviour of bees is similar to its effect on termites.

The pesticides, neonicotinoids, made by the German agribusiness giant Bayer and rapidly spreading in use, are known to be fatal to termites by damaging their ability to groom themselves and thus remove the spores of harmful fungi.

In a leaflet promoting an anti-termite insecticide, Premise 200SC, sold in Asia, the company says it is the direct effect on the insects' grooming abilities of the neonicotinoid active ingredient, imidacloprid, which eventually kills them. Now bee campaigners in Britain want to know if this mechanism could also be at work on European honey bees and other pollinating insects which are rapidly declining in numbers.

"Grooming protects insects from all kinds of pests and viruses, while helping to maintain general health and functioning," Ms Williams said yesterday. "A defence for honey bees against the varroa mite [a parasite causing colonies to decline] is to groom the mites away from the body. Do we know for sure that neonicotinoids do not hamper the ability of honey bees to deal with varroa?"

Matt Shardlow, chief executive of Buglife, the invertebrate conservation charity, said: "Scientific studies have shown that neonicotinoids significantly reduce the activity of honey bees, and it is highly likely that this would include a reduction in the amount of grooming that they do.

"Hence there is a clear potential mechanism for these pesticides to damage the first line of defence that insects have against disease. Again it seems clear that insecticides are linked to sickness in bees and impairment to pollination services."

The possibility fits in with what has already been discovered about the harmful effects of neonicotinoids – in that bees treated with imidacloprid, which is Bayer's biggest-selling insecticide worth £500m a year in sales to the company – are far more susceptible to disease, even at microscopic doses. This has been shown by two independent studies carried out in the past two years.

In its publicity material for Premise 200SC, Bayer says: "The termites are susceptible to disease caused by micro-organisms or fungi found in soil.

"A principal part of their defence system is their grooming habits, which allow the termites to get rid of the fungal spores before these spores germinate and cause disease or death. Premise 200SC interferes with this natural process by lowering defences to nature's own weaponry."

Dr Julian Little, Bayer's UK spokesman, said: "We do a lot of tests of the effects of insecticides on bees, and impairment of grooming has never shown up."

Specific tests to see whether or not bees' grooming ability was impaired by neonicotinoids had not been carried out, he added.

Source;
http://www.independent.co.uk/environ...e-2256737.html

[giovonni]

Water Into Ocean Everything Is Ok??

***********

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=17H02PsNe28

https://youtube.com/watch?v=17H02PsNe28


Radioactive water found leaking into sea from pit at Japan nuclear plant

By David Nakamura, Saturday, April 2, 12:40 PM

TOKYO — Authorities discovered highly radioactive water leaking from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the ocean Saturday, the latest sign that the desperate strategies being used to cool the overheating reactors could be creating new problems.

The toxic water had pooled by an almost eight-inch-long crack in the concrete wall of a pit at the No. 2 reactor where power cables are stored, Japan’s nuclear regulatory office said. The radioactivity level in the air above the water was measured at 1,000 millisieverts per hour, four times the maximum level that workers can be exposed to under Japanese law.

Emergency crews poured concrete into the crack Saturday afternoon and again in the evening in a bid to stem the leak, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said the government has instructed Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the power plant, to examine the facility for other potential leaks.

“Today we found highly irradiated water in the pit where the electricity cables are contained,” Nishiyama said at a news conference. “It seems that there is a crack on the side of the concrete wall of the pit. Some water is spilling out of the crack to the sea.”

The discovery raised the disconcerting possibility that the power company’s decision to drench the reactors with tens of thousands of tons of water in an attempt to submerge the exposed spent fuel rods is having an unintended side effect.

Workers have scrambled to try to figure out what to do with the irradiated water that has built up in the plant. They have put some in storage tanks and moved some into floating barges offshore. Yet three workers laying power cables at the plant two weeks ago suffered leg burns after stepping in a highly toxic pool of water; they were released from a radiation hospital this week after doctors concluded they had not suffered long-term damage.

Government officials said they had not determined the source of the radiation in the water that was found leaking Saturday.

“We will investigate the route the water is flowing into the pit,” Nishiyama said.

The setback undercut any momentum Prime Minister Naoto Kan had hoped to build when he announced Friday that the government would turn its attention to recovery and reconstruction.

Kan, making his first visit to areas affected by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, traveled in a Japanese military helicopter to Rikuzentakata in northern Iwate prefecture, which had been hit hard by the twin disasters. In the city of 23,000, more than 1,000 people are dead and 1,000 others remain missing, with 13,000 living in shelters, said Noriyuki Shikata, a government spokesman.

All told, 11,938 people were killed by the quake and tsunami with 15,478 missing, according to the National Police Agency.

Kan saw “mountains of debris and rubble, basically ruins,” Shikata said. The prime minister then visited the nuclear plant workers at a staging area about 12 miles from the plant, he added.

Meanwhile, Japan continued to receive aid from other countries, including a German-designed robot that can be used to remove debris and help repair the power plant, British radiation counters and gas masks and 10,000 tons of gas and diesel from China. A 15-member advance team from the U.S. military’s radiation control squadron arrived at Yokota Air Base, to be followed by 140 Marines who are trained to screen for radiation and prevent contamination.

Of the 32 foreign embassies in Tokyo that had suspended operations after the earthquake, 18 have reopened, Foreign Ministry spokesman Takeshi Matsunaga said.

Source;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...kOC_story.html

[giovonni]

This is the latest in the trend that I believe will end the era of mass production, and fundamentally change manufacturing.
Local installations will make many things with plans downloaded from the net.



New printer produces 3D objects on demand
http://www.gizmag.com/go/2578/

[giovonni]

This is like one of those cartoons where it says go no further bridge out, and the characters speed up.

***********

The Mellon Doctrine


By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 31, 2011

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” That, according to Herbert Hoover, was the advice he received from Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary, as America plunged into depression. To be fair, there’s some question about whether Mellon actually said that; all we have is Hoover’s version, written many years later.

But one thing is clear: Mellon-style liquidationism is now the official doctrine of the G.O.P.

Two weeks ago, Republican staff at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee released a report, “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy,” that argued that slashing government spending and employment in the face of a deeply depressed economy would actually create jobs. In part, they invoked the aid of the confidence fairy; more on that in a minute. But the leading argument was pure Mellon.

Here’s the report’s explanation of how layoffs would create jobs: “A smaller government work force increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs.” Dropping the euphemisms, what this says is that by increasing unemployment, particularly of “educated, skilled workers” — in case you’re wondering, that mainly means schoolteachers — we can drive down wages, which would encourage hiring.

There is, if you think about it, an immediate logical problem here: Republicans are saying that job destruction leads to lower wages, which leads to job creation. But won’t this job creation lead to higher wages, which leads to job destruction, which leads to ...? I need some aspirin.

Beyond that, why would lower wages promote higher employment?

There’s a fallacy of composition here: since workers at any individual company may be able to save their jobs by accepting a pay cut, you might think that we can increase overall employment by cutting everyone’s wages. But pay cuts at, say, General Motors have helped save some workers’ jobs by making G.M. more competitive with other companies whose wage costs haven’t fallen. There’s no comparable benefit when you cut everyone’s wages at the same time.

In fact, across-the-board wage cuts would almost certainly reduce, not increase, employment. Why? Because while earnings would fall, debts would not, so a general fall in wages would worsen the debt problems that are, at this point, the principal obstacle to recovery.

In short, Mellonism is as wrong now as it was fourscore years ago.

Now, liquidationism isn’t the only argument the G.O.P. report advances to support the claim that reducing employment actually creates jobs. It also invokes the confidence fairy; that is, it suggests that cuts in public spending will stimulate private spending by raising consumer and business confidence, leading to economic expansion.

Or maybe “suggests” isn’t the right word; “insinuates” may be closer to the mark. For a funny thing has happened lately to the doctrine of “expansionary austerity,” the notion that cutting government spending, even in a slump, leads to faster economic growth.

A year ago, conservatives gleefully trumpeted statistical studies supposedly showing many successful examples of expansionary austerity. Since then, however, those studies have been more or less thoroughly debunked by careful researchers, notably at the International Monetary Fund.

To their credit, the staffers who wrote that G.O.P. report were clearly aware that the evidence no longer supports their position. To their discredit, their response was to make the same old arguments, while adding weasel words to cover themselves: instead of asserting outright that spending cuts are expansionary, the report says that confidence effects of austerity “can boost G.D.P. growth.” Can under what circumstances? Boost relative to what? It doesn’t say.

Did I mention that in Britain, where the government that took power last May bought completely into the doctrine of expansionary austerity, the economy has stalled and business confidence has fallen to a two-year low? And even the government’s new, more pessimistic projections are based on the assumption that highly indebted British households will take on even more debt in the years ahead.

But never mind the lessons of history, or events unfolding across the Atlantic: Republicans are now fully committed to the doctrine that we must destroy employment in order to save it.

And Democrats are offering little pushback. The White House, in particular, has effectively surrendered in the war of ideas; it no longer even tries to make the case against sharp spending cuts in the face of high unemployment.

So that’s the state of policy debate in the world’s greatest nation: one party has embraced 80-year-old economic fallacies, while the other has lost the will to fight. And American families will pay the price.

Source;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/op...e&ref=homepage

[giovonni]

Once, years ago, walking across Louis Kahn's magnificent campus designed for the Jonas Salk Institute, Jonas Salk answered my question about how he had seen so clearly what others had not seen. He said, "The answers are not the hard part. It is the questions. Asking the right question. That's hard.”


An Appraisal of The Illness Profit System
STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Columnist - Explore - Schwartzreport

We are about to enter yet again into the great debate over American healthcare, and the discussion once again will be mostly couched in financial terms. I want to suggest money is the wrong question, and it leads us to the wrong debate. Here's what I think we should be asking: Is the health of the American people an essential part of our national security and prosperity? Is America better equipped to deal with the challenges of the 21st century when it has a healthy population more capable of working at its full potential? If the answer is ...

Once, years ago, walking across Louis Kahn's magnificent campus designed for the Jonas Salk Institute, Jonas Salk answered my question about how he had seen so clearly what others had not seen. He said, “The answers are not the hard part. It is the questions. Asking the right question. That's hard.”

We are about to enter yet again into the great debate over American healthcare, and the discussion once again will be mostly couched in financial terms. I want to suggest money is the wrong question, and it leads us to the wrong debate. Here's what I think we should be asking: Is the health of the American people an essential part of our national security and prosperity? Is America better equipped to deal with the challenges of the 21st century when it has a healthy population more capable of working at its full potential? If the answer is yes, then the next question to ask is: why is our healthcare system so very bad—37th in the world according to the World Health Organization?1 To answer that, we need to accept this reality and start fixing it by telling the truth to ourselves about money.

The Center for Defense Information estimates the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will total over $1 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2010.2 We have almost nothing to show for these wars and the sacrifices made by young men and women motivated by honor, duty, and a call to serve. Yet we have made these wars such a priority that in the midst of the worst economic downturn in two generations, we continue to fund them at a cost of tens of millions of dollars each and every day. It's not about the money.

We have a defense budget that is larger than the defense budgets of every other nation in the world combined—$683 billion, going to $743 billion in 2015.3 It's not about the money.

As Senator Bernie Sanders forced the Federal Reserve to reveal, “we found 3.3 trillion” to bail out our financial sector—to the benefit of a tiny percentage of the population.4 How can anyone say that when the priority is there, the money can't be found? And, anyway, we already spend more on our healthcare system than any other nation on earth.5

If we believe a healthy nation is a national priority, why aren't we getting results? Because, measured in a dozen different ways, our healthcare system is not about health. What we have in the United States is an Illness Profit System. The illnesses and traumas of human beings are just the mechanism by which the money taps are opened. It is part of the human condition that everybody gets something that requires medical attention some time in their life, and the Illness Profit System is structured to exploit this. If you get well, it makes money on your treatment. If you don't get well, it makes even more money on your treatment. The system is profitable at either end but is weighted toward illness. It's more profitable. To hide its rapacity, the Illness Profit System relies on the humanitarian face presented by the health professionals who administer the treatments. It understands and exploits their calling to the service of healing, and our natural deference to the men and women who care for us, even as the system is constantly and cynically trying to corrupt them.

The Project on Government Oversight is an independent nonprofit that “investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct to achieve a more effective, accountable, open, and ethical federal government.”6 On November 29, 2010—just a few days ago—they wrote Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), urging the NIH to curb “the practice of ghostwriting in academia. As the Director of the world's largest and most prestigious funding source for biomedical research, you must set policies that require NIH-funded academic centers to ban ghostwriting to strengthen scientific integrity.”6

Why did they make this request? Perhaps because the medical world has been increasingly challenged by ghostwriting—medical studies ostensibly written by the named authors that are, in fact, written under for a pharmaceutical company by a contract writing group.

This is a problem so pervasive that it has developed its own literature. I will cite one, this by Jeffrey Lacasse of the School of Social Work, College of Public Programs, Arizona State University, Phoenix, and Jonathan Leo of Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, TN. They recently published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS Medicine an assessment of medical ghostwriting, citing particularly two drugs and the published studies that got them on the market. One concerned rofecoxib, a Merck & Co nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug sold under the brand names Vioxx, Ceoxx, and Ceeoxx, that was taken off the market in 2004 when, in contradistinction to the published studies, it was withdrawn over safety concerns. The other concerned paroxetine, an anti-depressant marketed by GlaxoSmithKline (formerly known as SmithKline Beecham) under the brand names Aropax, Paxil, and Seroxat. Lacasse and Leo describe the role of medical ghostwriting using these drugs to illustrate their point this way:

Medical ghostwriting, the practice of pharmaceutical companies secretly authoring journal articles published under the byline of academic researchers, is a troubling phenomenon because it is dangerous to public health. For example, ghostwritten articles on Rofecoxib probably contributed to ‘… lasting injury and even deaths as a result of prescribers and patients being misinformed about risks.' Study 329, a randomized controlled trial of Paroxetine in adolescents, was ghostwritten to claim that Paroxetine is ‘generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents,' although data made available through legal proceedings show that ‘Study 329 was negative for efficacy on all 8 protocol specified outcomes and positive for harm.'7

Lacasse and Leo conclude: “The practice of ghostwriting explicitly violates the usual norms of academia. We are not aware of any other academic fields where it is acceptable for professors to allow themselves to be listed as authors on research papers they did not write, or to purposefully conceal the contributions of industry coauthors in order to mislead readers.”7

Why would pharmaceutical companies, a major component of the Illness Profit System, be interested in ghostwriting? Profit of course. Before it was withdrawn, sales revenue from Vioxx totaled US$2.5 billion.8

To fully understand the implications of ghostwriting, however, one has to place it in its larger context, which Donald Bartlett and James B. Steele do very well in the January Vanity Fair:

In 2009, according to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, 19,551 people died in the United States as a direct result of the prescription drugs they took. That's just the reported number. It's decidedly low, because it is estimated that only about 10 percent of such deaths are reported. Conservatively, then, the annual American death toll from prescription drugs considered ‘safe’ can be put at around 200,000. That is three times the number of people who die every year from diabetes, four times the number who die from kidney disease. Overall, deaths from F.D.A.-approved prescription drugs dwarf the number of people who die from street drugs such as cocaine and heroin. They dwarf the number who die every year in automobile accidents.9

Can one overemphasize the importance of ethical accurate medical literature? I don't think so. And why don't we read a constant litany of reports in all the media concerning these deaths? Could it be the advertising, the dubious grant funding, and sponsorships the Illness Profit System can marshal?

Another wrong question you will hear in the debate: is it all the fault of the bad health choices Americans make? As it happens, at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University researchers Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied asked just that question. They compared the healthcare systems of 13 first world nations, including the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.10

Their study, which covers the years 1975 to 2005, is particularly important, not only because it is recent and well designed, but because in addition to healthcare expenditures in each country, it focuses on 15-year survival for people at 45 years and for those at 65 years. As they say in their report published in the journal Health Affairs:

Many advocates of US health reform point to the nation's relatively low life-expectancy rankings as evidence that the health care system is performing poorly. Others say that poor US health outcomes are largely due not to health care but to high rates of smoking, obesity, traffic fatalities, and homicides. We used cross-national data on the fifteen-year survival of men and women over three decades to examine the validity of these arguments. We found that the risk profiles of Americans generally improved relative to those for citizens of many other nations, but Americans' relative fifteen-year survival has nevertheless been declining. For example, by 2005, fifteen-year survival rates for forty-five-year-old US white women were lower than in twelve comparison countries with populations of at least seven million and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of at least 60 percent of US per capita GDP in 1975. The findings undercut critics who might argue that the US health care system is not in need of major changes.10

Nicholas Bakalar, writing in The New York Times said:

In 1975 the United States was close to the average in health care costs, and last in 15-year survival for 45-year-old men. By 2005 its costs had more than tripled, far surpassing increases elsewhere, but the survival number was still last—a little over 90 percent, compared with more than 94 percent for Swedes, Swiss and Australians. For women, it was 94 percent in the United States, versus 97 percent in Switzerland, Australia and Japan.

The numbers for 65-year-olds in 2005 were similar: about 58 percent of American men could be expected to survive 15 years, compared with more than 65 percent of Australians, Japanese and Swiss. While more than 80 percent of 65-year-old women in France, Switzerland, and Japan would survive 15 years, only about 70 percent of American women could be expected to live that long.11

Muennig and Glied10 concluded: “We found that none of the prevailing excuses for the poor performance of the US health care system are likely to be valid. On the spending side, we found that the unusually high medical spending is associated with worsening, rather than improving, fifteen-year survival in two groups for whom medical care is probably important.”10

The Commonwealth Fund in its State-by-State Look at Health Insurance Costs reveals just how truly bizarre that “unusually high medical spending” has gotten:

Health insurance premiums have risen three times faster than incomes. according to a new Commonwealth Fund state-by-state analysis of employer coverage. In 2009, total premiums—including employee and employer contributions—equaled or exceeded 18 percent of the median household income in 26 states, up from three states in 2003.

The analysis of state trends from 2003 to 2009 finds family coverage in employer-sponsored health plans increased 41 percent across states, ranging from a 21 percent increase in Delaware to a 59 percent increase in Louisiana. The report found that by 2009, premiums were highest in Alaska, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, with family premiums in those states exceeding $14,000 a year. Annual family premiums in the lowest-cost states—Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah—were also high, ranging from $11,000 to $12,000 per year by 2009.12

Now let's take it down to individual procedures where the grotesqueness of the Illness Profit System's reality becomes even clearer. The International Federation of Health Plans has just released its 2010 Comparative Price Report: “The survey data showed that average U.S. prices for procedures were once again the highest of those in the 12 countries surveyed for nearly all of the 14 common services and procedures reviewed.”13

Here are some results:

•delivery of a baby: $2,147 in Germany, $2,667 in Canada, and an average of $8,435 in the United States;

•hip replacement: $9,637 in the UK, $20,069 in Australia, $75,369 in the United States;

•appendectomy: $3,456 in the UK, $4,624 in the Netherlands,$25,344 in the United States;

•cost for a typical hospital stay: $1,679 in Spain, $7,707 in Canada, $14,427 to $45,902 in the United States.

And through the entire weave of healthcare runs the pharmaceutical component of the Illness Profit System. It's hard to ignore, if you're one of the millions of Americans on a prescription drug regime. Its drive for naked profit is breathtaking: Nexium (brand name for esomeprazole), commonly prescribed for reflux conditions, is $30 in the United Kingdom, $186 is the average cost in the United States. One could go through the entire pharmacopoeia and see this differential, or worse, for almost every drug. It is enormously profitable, but is it consistent with health as the first priority?

And there is this reality: the Illness Profit System has not proved capable of designing a system of universal coverage, because when health is made the first priority, although it may be profitable, it cannot be as profitable as it could be.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention frames it:

In the first quarter of 2010, an estimated 59.1 million persons had no health insurance for at least part of the year before their interview, an increase from 58.7 million in 2009 and 56.4 million in 2008. Of the 58.7 million in 2009, 48.6 million (82.8%) were aged 18–64 years. Among persons aged 18–64 years with family incomes two to three times the federal poverty level (approximately $43,000–$65,000 for a family of four in 2009), 9.7 million (32.1%) were uninsured for at least part of the preceding year. Persons aged 18–64 years with no health insurance during the preceding year were seven times as likely (27.6% versus 4.0%) as those continuously insured to forgo needed health care because of cost. Among persons aged 18–64 years with diabetes mellitus, those who had no health insurance during the preceding year were six times as likely (47.5% versus 7.7%) to forgo needed medical care as those who were continuously insured.14

The data of the past three decades also tell us that just being a participant in the Illness Profit System can damage your life. Medical bankruptcy is a concept almost unknown in the rest of the world. In the United States it is quite common. In 2001, Harvard's Medical and Law Schools teamed up to look at this and discovered 1.458 million American families filed for bankruptcy.15 A research team led by David Himmelstein surveyed 1,771 personal bankruptcy filers in five federal courts and subsequently completed in-depth interviews with 931 of them, and published the results of the study in 2005 in the journal Health Affairs.16 Their report noted that “about half (the bankruptcies) cited medical causes, which indicates that 1.9-2.2 million Americans … experienced medical bankruptcy.” As if this were not cruel enough, about 700,000 of those affected were children.

One of the sure signs a system is working against the national interest is that it continues its destructive behavior even in a time of great stress, and that is exactly what we are seeing. In the midst of the worst financial environment since the Great Depression, as people are dropping from the insured ranks by the thousands, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies in the spring of 2009 began raising drug prices. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the profit illness industry has “been pushing through hefty price increases aimed at bolstering earnings, even as government and private insurers are struggling to rein in healthcare costs.”17

Good health and good healthcare are national assets that increase a nation's functionality, giving it a much better chance to prosper. The data on this are quite clear. Viewed from this perspective, the Illness Profit System damages national security, because its priority is not national health—but profit. This is not an argument against profit, categorically. There may be a place for profit, but the first question we should be asking is: how can we design a system that produces the healthy citizenry essential to our national security and prosperity, a healthcare system that is designed with that priority—and not profit—as its goal?

We need to ask the right questions. I think Jonas Salk was right.

Source;
http://www.explorejournal.com/articl...291-0/fulltext

[giovonni]

This is part of two trends: first, the demise of the pharmaceutical industry as it is presently constituted; and, second, the development of Homo Superiorus.

***********

Live human heart grown in lab using stem cells in potential transplant breakthrough



By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 12:22 PM on 4th April 2011

The organs were created by removing muscle cells from donor organs to leave behind tough hearts of connective tissue.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/ar...#ixzz1Id1vkROO

[giovonni]

When this was first reported, i was reluctant to post this...now i am absolutely convinced there is no coincidences in this world.

***********

Although my views on nuclear power are well-known in fairness i must report that an alternative nuclear technology is arising in China;
one that does not have at least some of the many drawbacks that plague the American, French, and Japanese reactors.

Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium


Thorium could be a much safer option for China which has been unsettled by the nuclear crisis in Japan where fears over radiation levels are rising

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
March 20, 2011

This passed unnoticed –except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts – but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould.

If China’s dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia’s industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West’s entrenched consumption.

China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say.

Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.

“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.

“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.

“They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.”

Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder. The metal has its own “issues” but no thorium reactor could easily spin out of control in the manner of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or now Fukushima.

Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University said thorium must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the fission process. “There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam. There are not enough neutrons for it continue of its own accord,” he said.

Dr Cywinski, who anchors a UK-wide thorium team, said the residual heat left behind in a crisis would be “orders of magnitude less” than in a uranium reactor.

The earth’s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said. Thorium is as common as lead. America has buried tons as a by-product of rare earth metals mining. Norway has so much that Oslo is planning a post-oil era where thorium might drive the country’s next great phase of wealth. Even Britain has seams in Wales and in the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Almost all the mineral is usable as fuel, compared to 0.7pc of uranium. There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years.

I write before knowing the outcome of the Fukushima drama, but as yet none of 15,000 deaths are linked to nuclear failure. Indeed, there has never been a verified death from nuclear power in the West in half a century. Perspective is in order.

We cannot avoid the fact that two to three billion extra people now expect – and will obtain – a western lifestyle. China alone plans to produce 100m cars and buses every year by 2020.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said the world currently has 442 nuclear reactors. They generate 372 gigawatts of power, providing 14pc of global electricity. Nuclear output must double over twenty years just to keep pace with the rise of the China and India.

If a string of countries cancel or cut back future reactors, let alone follow Germany’s Angela Merkel in shutting some down, they shift the strain onto gas, oil, and coal. Since the West is also cutting solar subsidies, they can hardly expect the solar industry to plug the gap.

BP’s disaster at Macondo should teach us not to expect too much from oil reserves deep below the oceans, beneath layers of blinding salt. Meanwhile, we rely uneasily on Wahabi repression to crush dissent in the Gulf and keep Arabian crude flowing our way. So where can we turn, unless we revert to coal and give up on the ice caps altogether? That would be courting fate.

US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation.

The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.

Dr Cywinski is developing an accelerator driven sub-critical reactor for thorium, a cutting-edge project worldwide. It needs to £300m of public money for the next phase, and £1.5bn of commercial investment to produce the first working plant. Thereafter, economies of scale kick in fast. The idea is to make pint-size 600MW reactors.

Yet any hope of state support seems to have died with the Coalition budget cuts, and with it hopes that Britain could take a lead in the energy revolution. It is understandable, of course. Funds are scarce. The UK has already put its efforts into the next generation of uranium reactors. Yet critics say vested interests with sunk costs in uranium technology succeeded in chilling enthusiasm.

The same happened a decade ago to a parallel project by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). France’s nuclear industry killed proposals for funding from Brussels, though a French group is now working on thorium in Grenoble.

Norway’s Aker Solution has bought Professor Rubbia’s patent. It had hoped to build the first sub-critical reactor in the UK, but seems to be giving up on Britain and locking up a deal to build it in China instead, where minds and wallets are more open.

So the Chinese will soon lead on this thorium technology as well as molten-salts. Good luck to them. They are doing Mankind a favour. We may get through the century without tearing each other apart over scarce energy and wrecking the planet.

Source;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/c...h-thorium.html

[giovonni]

This is what privacy has come to. We have just allowed it to be nibbled away.




Laptops and Other Electronics May Be Seized on Entry to US

Ned Smith, BusinessNewsDaily Senior Writer,
LiveScience.com Ned Smith, Businessnewsdaily Senior Writer,
livescience.com Thu Apr 7, 5:20 pm ET

If you can’t let a day go by without accessing your personal data and files, you’d better think twice about crossing the border back into the U.S. with your computer. That’s because digital devices such as a laptop computer can be seized at the border without a warrant and sent to a secondary site for forensic inspection.

That ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last week is the second in less than a year that allows the U.S. government to conduct offsite searches of digital devices seized at the border without a warrant, Network World reported.

This could have big implications for business travelers, in particular, who are increasingly mobile and frequently carry laptops and other digital devices containing sensitive personal and company information across our borders. If your data reveals traces of criminality or illegal kinkiness when examined, your troubles will go way beyond temporary data denial.

The Ninth Circuit Court ruling came in a case involving a man whose laptop was seized at the Mexican border when he re-entered the country at Lukeville, Ariz. Because he was a registered sex offender, custom officials confiscated his laptop computer for inspection.

Though an initial scan of the data revealed nothing incriminating, the agents sent the computer 170 miles away to a digital forensics lab in Tucson because so many of the files were password protected. That search detected images depicting child pornography and the man was subsequently arrested and indicted.

He filed a motion asking that the evidence be suppressed because it was the result of an unreasonable search in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.

Several lower courts agreed that the extended search of his laptop was unreasonable because the government didn’t have any reasonable suspicions that incriminating material would be found.

The government appealed, contending that border search doctrine allowed such actions, according to Network World.

In upholding the government’s argument, the Ninth Circuit Court noted that several other courts including the U.S. Supreme Court have recognized that by definition all border searches are reasonable because they occur at the border. The transportation of his computer was justified because the forensic tools needed to adequately search the computer were not available at Lukeville, a small, unincorporated community with a population of 35.

Writing for the majority, Judge Richard Tallman said, “The border search doctrine is not so rigid as to require the United States to equip every entry point — no matter how desolate or infrequently traveled — with inspectors and sophisticated forensics equipment.”

Source;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...ntrytous/print

[giovonni]

trends that are helping create the great divide ~ just plain simple greed...


Winklevoss twins lose Facebook appeal


Cameron (L) and Tyler (R) Winklevoss speak to reporters as they leave the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco after a court hearing back in January 2011.


A panel of federal judges on Monday ruled that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss can't back out of the settlement deal they made in a lawsuit charging that Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook.

"The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace," three Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges said in a ruling.

"At some point, litigation must come to an end," the judges continued. "That point has now been reached."

Twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss claim they enlisted Zuckerberg to finish software code for their ConnectU social-networking website while they were all students at Harvard in 2003.

Zuckerberg, a second year student at the time, took their code and their idea and launched Facebook in February 2004 instead of holding up his end of the deal, according to the brothers. Facebook rejects that account.

Hollywood made the saga famous in the hit film "The Social Network."

The twins inked a settlement two years ago that got them $20 million in cash and $45 million worth of stock valued at $36 per share.

The value of that yet-to-be-issued stock has skyrocketed along with Facebook's estimated market value, which was placed at $50 billion early this year, the judges noted in their ruling.

"With the help of a team of lawyers and a financial advisor, they made a deal that appears quite favorable in light of recent market activity," the judges said.

"For whatever reason, they now want to back out," they continued. "Like the district court, we see no basis for allowing them to do so."

Source;
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1

[giovonni]

For those who think of our prehistoric ancestors as primitives -- Ug, ug and all that --- surprise. i can tell you that when you go into these caves and actually see this art in its natural context you are stunned with their artistic vision. They are the equal of Picasso. We must divest ourselves of our stereotypes if we are to understand our past.

How were Ice Age cave painters able to create great art?



FINTAN O'TOOLE

Sat, Apr 02, 2011

THE ROCK paintings in the Chauvet cave in southern France that are the subject of Werner Herzog’s marvellous film Cave of Forgotten Dreams are both astonishingly old and disconcertingly new.

The old part of the equation is as obvious as it is astounding. The entire history of human settlement on the island of Ireland spans about 10,000 years. The Chauvet paintings are three times older than that.

Their discovery in 1994 revolutionised the history of art. The charcoal used for drawings of rhinoceroses and bison on the cave wall proved to be about 31,000 years old. That’s almost twice as old as the rock art of Lascaux, previously considered to be the first flowering of the human impulse to draw or paint images.

The Chauvet paintings, moreover, are disturbingly good. Logic would suggest the first efforts at anything ought to be a bit crap. This is not to patronise our ancient ancestors but merely to suggest that any radically new endeavour ought to begin with fumbling trials and unfortunate errors. There are many mysteries about the Chauvet paintings, but the biggest is their sheer accomplishment. It would be awe-inspiring to think of people making art of any kind in the harsh environment of Ice Age Europe. It is quite shocking to think of them making great art.

And yet, as you can see in Herzog’s film, these images are great art. The lines are drawn with fluidity and elegance. The artists understood and used techniques like shading and perspective. Instead of regarding the uneven surfaces of the cave as impediments, they used them to their advantage, deploying the curves and niches in the rock walls to create vivid impressions of life and movement. There is even what Herzog calls an element of “proto-cinema”: some of the animals are drawn with multiple legs to suggest rapid movement. The images were placed in a dark space, flickeringly illuminated with torches: the effect may have been somewhat analogous to that of watching a movie.

These techniques are so extremely unlikely that there was a strong suspicion the paintings had to be a hoax. By proving otherwise, archaeology and carbon dating do something that scientists must find uncomfortable: they deepen a mystery. To me at least, finding these great paintings from so far back in time is a bit like finding an iPad with no previous evidence of the development of electronics. How does humanity plunge so suddenly into this great sea of creativity? Unless there is a whole history of extremely old and not-very-good cave paintings still to be discovered, we are left with the sudden birth of a fully formed pictorial art.

In Herzog’s film there is a delightful but (to me) unconvincing suggestion about the origins of this art. An expert says people learned to make paintings from seeing their own shadows on the wall. Herzog mutters “Fred Astaire” and then cuts to Astaire dancing with his shadows in a brilliant sequence from George Stevens’s 1936 movie Swing Time . It’s a lovely thought and typical of Herzog’s habit of inspired analogy.

But it doesn’t make much sense. The intriguing thing about the Chauvet paintings is that the artists chose not to make images of human beings like themselves. They clearly had the techniques to represent the human form, but it did not interest them.

There are handprints of the artists (one recognisable by a deformed little finger). And there is one image of the lower part of a woman’s body, its sexual features exaggerated. But it is linked to or even fused with a bison. This is not a realistic depiction of a woman but a mythic image strikingly reminiscent of Picasso’s paintings of the woman and the minotaur.

Not only are there no humans: there are no human activities in the paintings, either. Where are the depictions of hunting and fishing, of huts and campfires? But the absence of the human goes even further. The most rational explanation for the effort that went into the creation of these marvellous images is that they represented some kind of magical control over the game the hunters would pursue. As Ernest Gombrich put it in his classic The Story of Art : “These primitive hunters thought that if only they made a picture of their prey . . . the real animals would also succumb to their power.”

This makes complete sense except for one thing: the animals in the Chauvet images are mostly not those that were hunted. Sixty per cent of the paintings are of dangerous animals like lions, bears and rhinos, which did not form part of the Paleo-lithic diet.

If they were not trying to depict and therefore to understand themselves, and were not trying to exert some kind of magical control over their sources of food, what were these artists doing?

Here we can perhaps draw some inspiration from what is so new about the Chauvet images. They are, for us, a form of virtual reality. We can never “see” them. Their delicacy and importance mean access to the cave is limited to 12 people a day, for just 30 days a year. Apart from a handful of scientists, Chauvet will always be off-limits.

It exists within our culture, therefore, primarily as a simulacrum. Herzog’s entrancing 3D documentary is not, in effect, a record of Chauvet. For the vast majority of humanity it is Chauvet. These images from 30,000 years ago now exist primarily in the digital realm.

Perhaps, though, this does not alienate us from the distant ancestors who made the paintings. Maybe it brings us closer to them. Perhaps they made the images not to mirror reality but to create a parallel, virtual reality.

Might it have made sense, rather than having to capture and sacrifice dangerous beasts, to offer the gods a metaphor, an image that is even more powerful than the real thing? If so we are left with the reassuring thought that the need and desire to create alternative realities is not some perversion of the modern human brain but has been hard-wired into it for as long as we can imagine.

© 2011 The Irish Times

Source;
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...293608410.html

[MariaDine]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=79lUYQwZNh4

Namasté

[phimonic]

if you liked the 3d-printer check this out - both nothing really new - this vid is from 2008

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=A4lm_CgISnA

at around 1:50 it becomes visually interesting

[giovonni]

i absolutely support this. Perhaps it will provide the seed for a movement. i am willing to go into the streets over this.

***********

Madison (Wisconsin) activists push resolution to deny constitutional rights to corporations



By Sahil Kapur
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Wisconsin activists are promoting a symbolic resolution in the city of Madison to build support for the belief that corporations don't deserve constitutional rights like people.

"Only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights," reads the terse resolution offered by the group Move To Amend. "Money is not speech, and therefore regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech."

The Supreme Court's decision last year in Citizens United vs. FEC granted corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections -- federal law would legally override attempts by cities and states to reverse it.

The move was covered by the local Isthmus newspaper and heralded in a letter to the editor published in another Madison paper. "It’s time to say 'no' to the court's decision," wrote Jacqueline Kelley. "On April 5, we can vote 'yes' twice for the amendment as residents of both Madison and Dane County. Our future could depend upon a proper outcome."

The full text of the resolution follows.

####

"RESOLVED, the City of Madison, Wisconsin, calls for reclaiming democracy from the corrupting effects of undue corporate influence by amending the United States Constitution to establish that:
1. Only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights, and
2. Money is not speech, and therefore regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech."

Source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/1...-corporations/

[giovonni]

I have a dozen similar stories concerning different parts of the country, and the world.

This is going to go on for months, perhaps longer, and it is in the cumulative effect that the real danger lies.

**********************
Europeans warned to avoid drinking milk or eating vegetables due to high radiation levels
http://www.naturalnews.com/032050_ra...radiation.html

[phimonic]

it's no problem at all - look - it is slowly stabilizing ^^ (at level 7!! ^^ )

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post197233
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post197409

this is madness!
that poor chief secretary - we better send him and those people good vibes,.. they must be very desperate - i still wonder what the claw is all about (think)

[giovonni]

For those who include meat in their diets here in the U.S. - or anywhere for that matter...

Here is another aspect of the Big Agra trend. I advise you to locate and work with local food sources, that grow their animals and fowl humanely, and cultivate organically.

***********

High bacteria levels in meat at U.S. stores: report

By Aman Ali

NEW YORK | Fri Apr 15, 2011 6:02pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Meat found on grocery store shelves often contains high levels of bacteria, with more than half of the bacteria resistant to multiple types of antibiotics, a study released on Friday said.

The meat is still safe to eat but consumers should take precautions especially in handling and cooking, the chief researcher for the study said.

The Translational Genomics Research Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research group, checked 136 meat samples from 26 grocery stores in Illinois, Florida, California, Arizona and Washington, D.C.

Dr. Lance Price, the head researcher on the study, said high levels of Staphylococcus aureus (S.Aureus) bacteria were found in the meat.

"Staph causes hundreds of thousands of infections in the United States every year," Price said in an interview. "It causes a whole slew of infections ranging from skin infections to really bad respiratory infections like pneumonia."

The Food and Drug Administration said it is aware of the study's findings, and similar studies of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in meats, and is working with the U.S. Agriculture Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the issue.

Price said the most significant finding is not the level of bacteria on the meats, but rather how the bacteria are becoming strongly resistant to antibiotics used to treat animals before slaughter.

The study found that in 96 percent of the meats with staph bacteria, the bacteria were resistant to at least one type of antibiotic, and 52 percent were resistant to three or more types.

"The bacteria is always going to be there. But the reason why they're resistant is directly related to antibiotic use in food animal production," Price said. "Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to public health we face today."

"This is one more reason to be very careful when you're handling raw meat and poultry in the kitchen," Price said. "You can cook away these bacteria. But the problem is when you bring in that raw product, you almost inevitably contaminate your kitchen with these bacteria."

Turkey was the meat that most often contained bacteria resistant to three or more antibiotics, followed by pork, beef and chicken.

The study was published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases on Friday and is available here http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/conten...id.cir181.full

(Additional reporting by Esha Dey in Washington; Editing by Xavier Briand)

Source;
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...ticNews&ca=go2

[giovonni]

Through the quotidian rhythm imposed by SR I sit at my computer and watch streams of data trek across my desk, the influences shaping the World's and America's future. The details teach me the trends if I can find the pattern. I publish SR to show you these trends so you can see them swell and retreat, like a melody in a symphony. The trick is to put all judgments aside and just follow the data with no cherished outcome.

The stories I have to do, like those today, often give me no pleasure and, increasingly, I find myself thinking about what is to be done. I offer this: Spend at least 30 minutes each day supporting in someway the things you believe in. Whether the form is a demonstration, volunteering, or funding, do this faithfully each day. If my readers would make that commitment we can change our society in a compassionate and life-affirming manner.

Can I count on you?

-- Stephan

[giovonni]

As with the financial crisis no one and no company involved with the Gulf Crisis is being held accountable. Nothing changes. The well closure devices, known to be flawed, are still in use. The American Federal government now quite blatantly puts corporate interests ahead of the interests of the people. Democrat or Republican it doesn't really matter, with a few notable individual exceptions, such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. The Fix is in across the board.

***********

Nil, Baby, Nil: Congress Fails To Pass A Single Oil Spill Law



Updated: 04/20/11 12:01 PM ET

NEW YORK -- Soon after his son Gordon died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion last April, Keith Jones made eight trips to Washington D.C. to push for stronger safety measures in offshore oil drilling and to increase the compensation paid to victims of the tragic accident. He met with President Obama, who apologized for the families' "unimaginable grief" and cradled Gordon's baby boy Maxwell in his arms.

When Jones arrived on Capitol Hill, he says he was mobbed by Senators and Representatives eager to express their condolences and to promise that they would swiftly pass legislation to make sure such a tragedy never happens again.

He is still waiting.

In the year since the worst environmental disaster in the nation's history, Congress hasn't adopted any major laws on oil and gas drilling -- despite introducing more than 150 bills to improve the safety and oversight of offshore drilling and holding more than 60 hearings to discuss the spill's causes and consequences with regulators, oil company officials, grieving relatives and Gulf-area fishermen.

"Nothing has happened," said Jones, speaking by phone from his law office in Baton Rouge. "When oil was still gushing out of the Gulf, everybody wanted to do everything right, to do whatever they could to keep that from happening again. But that was then. Now, everybody is back to drilling more, making more money and not worrying about safety. That attitude is what cost the lives of 11 men and caused the biggest environmental disaster in our history," he said.

Jones traces the inaction to political gridlock and to the nation's fading attention span. He claims that as soon as the gushing undersea well was capped and the nonstop TV coverage slowed to a trickle in July, he no longer commanded the same attention.

"I remember the day they capped that well -- those images had been up in the corner of every TV screen, all that oil gushing into the ocean -- I stopped seeing senators and congressmen and started seeing staffers."

In January, President Obama's oil spill commission released a slew of recommendations for changes that would seek to ensure safer drilling operations, provide better spill response, lift the existing liability cap on oil companies and secure funding for coastal restoration efforts in the Gulf. Yet though bipartisan leaders of the commission have personally lobbied members of Congress, no major legislation has been adopted. Lawmakers did accept the commission's recommendation for a budget increase for the federal agency with oversight of offshore drilling.

"I am disappointed," said oil spill commission co-chairman William Reilly, a former EPA administrator under President George H.W. Bush. He added that he is worried by House Natural Resources Committee chair Rep. Doc Hastings' (R-Wash.) intention "to wait until all the investigations are resolved before developing his own legislation. One hopes that it will be responsive to the commission's recommendations," Reilly said.

A bill sponsored by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) that would enact many of the commission's recommendations has little chance of passing, given the Republican majority in the House.

Markey expressed his disappointment at the lack of a legislative response in a statement provided to The Huffington Post:

"One year after the BP spill began, the American people and the citizens of the Gulf shouldn't believe that another major spill couldn't occur, or that our response wouldn't be as sub-par as it was during last summer's spill. Many holes still exist in our offshore drilling safety regime, and another spill could happen again."

About 18 months after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 -- the largest spill in the nation's history at the time -- Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act, which required companies to detail their spill-prevention and spill-cleanup plans, notes Richard Charter, a senior policy adviser at Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group.

"You're seeing Congress pretend that Deepwater never happened," he said. "You're seeing them say, 'Let's take similar risks in sensitive areas, in spite of what happened.'"

Just last week, the House Natural Resources Committee passed three bills to accelerate the offshore drilling permitting process and open up new areas to drilling off the coasts of California, Florida, Massachusetts and North Carolina. The bill's sponsor, Hastings, says his legislation increases safety oversight by writing a requirement for government permitting of offshore drilling projects into federal law.

The legislation, which would require federal regulators to act on offshore drilling permits within 30 days, alarmed environmentalists and members of the administration who expressed their concern that it rushes an important process.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar blamed Republicans for having a "sense of amnesia" about last year's spill, adding, "much of the legislation that I have seen being bandied around, especially with the House Republicans, is almost as if the Deepwater Horizon Macondo well incident never happened."

The opposition to new legislation that requires stricter oversight largely stems from the anti-regulatory zeal of conservative lawmakers and from the influence of the oil industry, say congressional staffers from both parties.

In 2010, the oil and gas industry spent more than $146 million to lobby the federal government and donated $28 million to federal campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

"The lobbying is relentless and continuous on the Hill," says John Amos, a former oil industry geologist who heads the SkyTruth environmental group. "And the public sector groups are no match for the well-oiled machine that the American Petroleum Institute is."

Shortly before he introduced his legislation, Hastings held a closed-door, invitation-only meeting with top energy lobbyists, Politico reported. A spokesperson for Hastings did not return several requests for comment.

And BP is back to making contributions to politicians -- largely to GOP leaders -- breaking a self-imposed moratorium on such donations in the wake of the oil spill. The oil giant gave $5,000 contributions to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), among others.

Last week, Louisiana's senators, Mary Landrieu (D) and David Vitter (R), introduced legislation that calls for dedicating at least 80 percent of BP penalties paid under the Clean Water Act to Gulf states to restore the coastal ecosystem and its economies damaged by the spill.

Some lawmakers from both parties have argued that new legislation should await the results of several ongoing investigations into the accident by the National Academy of Engineering and the Chemical Safety Board. Though the same caution was preached in advance of the oil spill commission's findings in January, no new legislation has been proposed. Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) expressed his concern about the tendency in Washington for incidents to prompt new laws "and a whole new level of bureaucracy. ... There's no question we need to improve oversight, but I rather doubt that a new law is a good thing," he told the Shreveport Times. "That's sort of a knee-jerk reaction we have in Washington."

Offshore drilling watchdog SkyTruth's John Amos, whose satellite-imagery exposed the true extent of the spill, advocates legislation that requires stronger oversight of deepwater drilling but agreed it "may be appropriate to keep your powder dry while the Chemical Safety Board [probe] is still going on."

Some of the presidential oil spill commission's recommendations have been adopted by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement, the regulatory agency that oversees offshore drilling. Led by former prosecutor Michael Bromwich, the successor agency to the scandal-prone Minerals Management Service has won praise for ramping up oversight, though critics claim that it still depends too much on industry-written standards and has not yet revamped its oil spill response plans. Since imposing new safety and environmental rules, the bureau has approved 46 new shallow-water wells and 10 permits for deepwater drilling projects that had been blocked by Obama's moratorium in the wake of the oil spill.

Among Jones's biggest frustrations was to witness first-hand the collapse of an uncontroversial bill to change an archaic law, the Death on the High Seas Act, that limits the damages that the families of the 11 victims of the Deepwater Horizon can recover. After passing the House, the bill was held up in the Senate due to lobbying by cruise lines and shipping companies until Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-Del.) adjusted it to only apply to the Deepwater victims. But one senator, Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) blocked the body from voting on it in December, just before the end of the congressional session.

Jones said that he tried to talk to the senator but "he didn't have time for me." One of DeMint's staffers told Jones that the senator objected because he did not believe that Congress should pass laws that have a retroactive effect, the staffer claimed.

"That's a lie," thundered Jones, explaining that DeMint voted in the House to pass legislation in 2000 that amended the liability for aviation accidents to make it retroactive by five years. And a week after blocking the bill to amend the Death on the High Seas Act, DeMint supported the legislation to help treat 9/11 first responders.

DeMint was also the only senator who prevented a vote by unanimous consent on a bill that would have given President Obama's oil spill commission subpoena power -- a spokesman later said that DeMint himself did not object to the provision but that he was acting on behalf of "members of the Republican conference." He eventually lifted the block and the measure passed. A similar measure had earlier passed the House by a vote of 420-1.

A spokesperson for DeMint declined several requests for comment.

Former Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.) who voted for the bill to amend the Death on the High Seas Act, says he was stunned that it didn't pass, especially since it appears that there was negligence.

"How do you tell these people that you and your children don't get a thing?" he asked. "In good conscience, it's difficult for me to understand."

Source;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_851274.html